Climate feedback

By stoat on June 4, 2007.

After a shaky start, Nature's Climate Feedback is staging a renaissance, with two interesting posts by Kevin Trenberth. The first, Predictions of Climate should provide some good quote mining for the septics (none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate, anyone?) and some hope for the climate modellers (However, the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate. But we need them. Indeed it is an imperative! So the science is just beginning. Beginning, that is, to face up to the challenge of building a climate information system that tracks the current climate and the agents of change, that initializes models and makes predictions, and that provides useful climate information on many time scales regionally and tailored to many sectoral needs - so much for JA's climate modelling is dead post - I only say that to provoke him into producing it).

The second is on the exciting hurricanes issue, where Trenberth takes on "off in a huff" Landsea. The argument is over whether the early (pre-1950's) data is skewed by seeing fewer hurricanes; Landsea argues that the landfalling fraction should remain constant, Trenberth says not, perhaps it should decrease. But... a decreasing fraction of landfalling hurricanes is *good* news not bad.

They still don't get many comments though, so head over there.

Tags
climate communication

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I thought the hurricane article was from a while ago, and it was an interesting response to Landsea's EOS article, which itself was interesting. I also thought Elser's comment useful. Yes. This is a vast improvement.